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I've lost 15kg (from 95-97kg down to 80-82kg) in about 8 months by doing treadmill + mild diet.

It turned out that my basal rate was about 1900kcal (measured in a lab by exhaled CO2 concentration) and getting food intake down to 1200-1300kcal to get a decent 500kcal caloric deficit for noticeable weight loss was not trivial. I tried it and it's discouraging.

However, by walking 3-4 hours a day on a treadmill I gradually increased my basal rate to about 2100kcal (more muscle mass, yay!) and it burns around 500kcal directly. So I get a 700kcal deficit without following a strenuous diet.

And don't forget other perks - it's easy to get a cardio workout (just increase treadmill speed), you feel much healthier and can easily walk large distances when doing 'touristy' things on holidays/vacations.

Of course, if you're used to eating 4000kcal then nothing is going to help you until you decrease your caloric intake.

Check your numbers. The western part of the country had a historically hot winter. California has broken pretty much all the records - the hottest winter, the lowest snow amount and so on. It's crazy, we've had a real heat wave in SFBA. In freaking March!

As for your 'gas prices' anecdote - the actual statistics show that the gas consumption in the US had not changed this winter (quite the opposite): http://www.rtcc.org/2015/01/21...

How do we know that those repetitions are not needed to accelerate (by parallel processing) some important process which, with a single expression, would otherwise be too slow to survive?

You absolutely do NOT want them to be expressed. In fact, your genome tries really hard to suppress them - all they do is replicating themselves. That's the reason so much of your genome consists of them.

Dependency on statistical properties is doubtful - organisms have more than 100x natural variance in genome sizes within fairly closely related species (just look at plants) without much outward difference. Even in animals, some species have a small and compact genomes (pufferfish) without much junk.

1) 60% of the DNA is _definitely_ junk, as they consist of known repeated elements (LINEs, SINEs and others) and defunct genes. This is not an 'absence of evidence', we know exactly how this DNA has happened.

2) Around 10% of DNA is structural. While this is technically not 'junk', this DNA does not encode anything useful.

3) Around 5% are coding sections and regulatory elements.

4) Another 5% of DNA appear to be stable under mutation pressure. So it might have some function.

4) And finally we have around 20% of DNA whose purpose is not known, but we know that random mutations in it do not visibly affect the phenotype.

I would suggest to simply forget the myth that "working out" makes you lose weight.

Actually, it can work. Get a treadmill desktop and walk 12-15 kilometers on it every day (it's easy enough). That's about 700-800kcal, more than enough to create enough caloric deficit for significant weight loss.

I'm sure that means that we should institute summary execution for traffic tickets. After all, first you exceed the speed limit, then you drive drunk and then you plow at high speed through a group of innocent little children. We can't have that.

Since gun fondlers are impervious to reason, it's better to start from the extreme position. You want every toddler carry an untraceable gun suitable only for crimes but not for legitimate self-defence?